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Dish Network's Charlie Ergen Says Networks Have Their Heads In The Sand

Charlie Ergen has a message for Les Moonves and his fellow media CEOs: You can’t hide from the future, or sue it into submission.

The Dish Network chairman and majority shareholder doesn’t make a habit of making himself accessible to either investors or press, but on Wednesday he surprised both by sitting in on Dish’s year-end earnings call and opening up the Q&A, usually reserved for analysts, to reporters.

Naturally, many of the questions revolved around the satellite provider’s DVR, the Hopper, whose AutoHop commercial-skipping feature has provoked lawsuits and other retaliations from angry broadcast networks terrified it will undermine their business model.

Their fears, Ergen suggested, are both justified and misplaced. “Some people are averse to change, but the advertising model is going to change with or without the Hopper,” he said. “We see it changing. What we’re saying to the broadcasters is there’s a way for you not to put your head in the sand.”

The major broadcast networks — all of which refused to air commercials for the Hopper, according to Dish CEO Joe Clayton — are wasting their energy worrying about technologies that make it easier to skip commercials, because even without AutoHop (which automates the act of skipping during some types of programming) viewers are already fast-forwarding through many ads, said Ergen.

“In fact, I would venture to say even some network executives are skipping commercials,” he said.

The problem, he said, isn’t that television commercials are inherently flawed but that there are too many of them and they’re not targeted well enough to be interesting to viewers. “I believe customers will watch meaningful advertising and they’ll be happy they’re paying less for programming as a result,” he said, but not as long as they have to sit through 18 minutes of spammy advertising every hour. “I don’t believe that’s a good model for us or sustainable for the networks.”

“You can fight change, or you can embrace change, as painful as it is sometimes,” he added. “When we see change is going to happen, we try to get in front of it so we can participate in it and we can try to shape it.”

Perhaps someday the big media conglomerates will come around to his way of thinking. In the meantime, they’re suing Dish, even as one of them, Disney, is due for renewal of its carriage agreements. Ergen said he wasn’t worried that the dispute over AutoHop would derail those talks. “We’re a pretty large customer to Disney,” he said. “Our checks are pretty big.”

Given how central sports programming is to every pay TV provider’s offerings, losing ESPN would be “a short term problem for us,” he conceded. But he suggested that Disney would regret going down that road, with many consumers eventually finding themselves happy to pay substantially less, even if it meant going without ESPN. “We are reaching a level of diminishing returns” with with cost of sports rights, he said. “How much will a consumer pay to watch sports content? We can’t continue to eat this.”

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Listen to Charlie Ergan, and then some. I for one was sick of paying high prices for cable and satellite only to block off 80% of the garbage they offer. I was one who skipped through all the commercials he mentioned. AND I always mute Political Propaganda on my television.

I cancelled all pay for TV and went back to antenna TV. What did I do with the nearly $100.00 I save each month? Well, I have choices again! I can purchase the DVD programs I enjoy, I can take in a play or a movie, go bowling or …. and I find I have much more time to read a good book. My life has IMPROVED.

I will not go back to cable or satellite until they do as Canada does, and offer me programming ala carte so I pay for what I want and not the garbage they try to force on me.

I’m not willing to pay anything for sports coverage and I am also sick of subsidizing men’s TV content. The only good thing about content labeled as being for women is it concentrates a lot of offensive T & A ads in one easily avoidable place and I am also tired of paying for that. If you have the ability to target advertising why am I bombarded with hootchie women trying to sell me things? I am a normal woman who is not attracted to other women. How hard is this targeting people? Figure it out!

I would love to pay less for what I pay my provider to tv service. I don’t need 10 sports channels or the other channels that air shows like big brother or the bachelor. Plus i do not need MTV they show nothing but crap anyway.

Charlie Ergen you stole 880.00 from me.and all i did was pay for a friends 49.95 start fee. then your wonderfull co. started stealing money out of my acct.I called you and was told your Co. can do and steal what they want and i cant do a darn thing,and they hung up on me…….

Charlie Eagen is right on the money. Nobody watches those boring commercials over and over through programming if they don’t have to. We are sick of being over charged so some athlete can sign a 3 year contract for 100 million plus perks…it’s crazy. Things need to change…right on Charlie!!

Commercials need to be more engaging and entertaining or they ARE a waste of advertising dollars. I think product placement in movies and shows will be the future. And why do I pay a monthly fee for Huluplus and still have to watch commercials? The consumer is getting more savvy and fed up, don’t bite the hand that feeds you.

If it holds up in court, you know that the other cable providers will be right behind Dish in providing this type of service. Aside from being highly useful for consumers, it also gives them a way to undermine the content providers’ advertising revenue, rendering them more and more dependent on cable providers for solvency (i.e. they can push back more on retransmission fees).

my roomate’s step-mother makes $71/hr on the laptop. She has been fired from work for 9 months but last month her paycheck was $13639 just working on the laptop for a few hours. Read more on this site,….. BIT40.ℂOℳ

I got Dish back in the mid 90′s cost me over $1300 to buy dish and receiver monthly bill around $90 for all channels dropped movies when it was costing almost $200 a month . Finnaly got rid of them and went to Direct more actule channels to watch they don’t count music channels Hope everone enjoyes their free receivers that the get now